The author of the music-biz satire Kill Your Friends acquires a middle initial for his first thriller. Out in the wilds of Canada, Donnie Miller is married to a wealthy newspaper editor and lives in a vast house where he spends his days working on DVD reviews and screenplays he never finishes. It's a world away from his impoverished Scottish childhood – one defined by deadly violence and secrets he has never told. When the family dog is killed, Donnie has a sixth sense that his past may be about to catch up with him … Niven is a deft writer who pumps unease like gas into the space between what Donnie was and what he has become. The novel covers a lot of ground – sexual politics, "evil" kids, the tension between social and moral transformation. If its manifest desire to be a film is sometimes overwhelming, Cold Hands is still a solid, gripping piece of work.

The Labyrinth of Osiris by Paul Sussman (Bantam, £12.99)

This is Sussman's unintended swansong: he died in May from a brain haemorrhage. It's the third in the series of police procedurals-cum-architectural thrillers that began in 2002 with Lost Army of Cambyses – novels whose stylish writing and deep research showed how careful you should be not to judge a genre by its worst examples. The Labyrinth of Osiris reunites Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police and Jerusalem detective Arieh Ben-Roi, who must pool their resources to investigate a murder in Jerusalem's Armenian district, which may be connected to the disappearance of an English engineer back in 1931. Their crotchety friendship is nicely sketched, especially the way it has changed over the years to accommodate life experiences such as Ben-Roi's loss of his fiancée Galia in a bomb blast. In fact, it's the three-dimensionality of the characters that makes the package work so well; what a shame there won't be another.

Vanished by Tim Weaver (Penguin, £7.99)

Weaver's "skip-tracer" David Raker – who finds missing persons by any means necessary – is one of those characters whose genteel, well-tempered narration is rather at odds with his line of work. But no matter. Vanished sees Raker not just in a new relationship with a hotshot lawyer, but hunting an elusive quarry – a banker who got on to a tube train one day but seemingly never got off. Hours spent poring over security camera footage reveal nothing. What Houdini-like trick did he perform? And what does he have to do with a serial killer with a habit of shaving hair off his victims and leaving it in a tidy pile where the bodies should be? This is the third of Weaver's books featuring Raker, and they get better each time – tense, complex, sometimes horrific, written with flair as well as care.

Unsmiling psychotherapist Dr Frieda Klein returns in Nicci Gerrard and Sean French's second crime novel, which like its predecessor Blue Monday has pleasing shades of the gothic psychological thrillers with which they made their names. When the naked body of an unknown man is found by a social worker, the police are unable to get any sense out of the middle-aged woman whose flat it was decomposing in. ("I was entertaining him," she says. "And he sang for me.") Is she as mad as she seems? Was it murder, and if so, did the woman do it, or is Klein correct to say that she couldn't have done? Klein is engagingly awkward, and her arm's-length involvement with the case allows the authors to dramatise the clashes of protocol that make contemporary crime-solving interesting to us but onerous to those at the sharp end. A vivid, finely crafted performance.

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